As Professor Danny Dorling from the University of Sheffield has shown, the gap between the poorest and most affluent areas has widened over the last thirty years. Indeed, areas that were highly disadvantaged a century ago probably remain so today, as Charles Booth’s surveys of poverty in London in the 1880s amply demonstrate. Poorer areas tend to be increasingly populated by the poorest groups, including highly excluded communities such as refugees, asylum-seekers, migrants and the white, workless poor.   

It is absolutely crucial that we focus on how equality can help to shape local areas and places, ensuring that statutory public bodies pay due regard to social and economic disadvantage. There also needs to be greater emphasis on local diversity and experimentation, including harnessing the potential of the Voluntary and Community Sector as David Blunkett advocates in his recent Fabian Society Freethinking paper. This requires other elements such as ensuring high quality measurement and local data-gathering.  All of these measures should be set out in the forthcoming Equality Bill, helping to ensure a concerted drive towards equality across the country.

This will be particularly important at a time of economic slowdown, when there is a significant risk that the fallout of recession will impact disproportionately on the most disadvantaged groups. We must ensure that investments are in place, together with well-defined and targeted programmes, to protect people from the corrosive effects of deprivation and long-term unemployment. That means requiring public authorities to act at the local level, as well as empowering them to do so with adequate resources and the means to affect change.